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Saccharine Shrine Feature

Saccharine Shrine is the cutest brand you’ll ever meet! The brand is made up of two motivated young ladies Charlie and Georgie who are cutting their way through all of the pink P.V.C in the world and creating sickeningly sweet designs. So prepare for some pink fluff and tantalise your inner pretty with this brand. One of their purple fluffy outfits also appeared in issue 02, worn by living doll Audrey Kitching!

Who do you design for? Who is your audience?

We design for confident and fun people who aren’t afraid to wear what makes them happy.

How would you describe the brand?

Textural, cheeky and Kawaii.

Why is the brand important? What makes it special and unique?

It is important to us because we get to make Dream outfits that you can’t buy anywhere else. I would say one of the things that make it special is the fact as well as doing seasonal lines we add pieces all the time, so if we dream up an idea in the morning, it could well be made and on the website that night. Super fast fun fashion!

What motivates you?

Seeing our designs on amazing people around the world. Recently Eliza Doolittle wore our Party Heart Bralet for a performance with Disclosure on The Jimmy Kimmel Show in America, which has 3 million viewers, that was amazing! We always love seeing customers who shop in our Tokyo stockist (Bubbles) and our L.A one (Haus of Love ) in our pieces. Also working with some amazing superstylists like Avigail Collins and Alexis Knox has been brilliant!

What inspires your designs?

It can be anything really; childhood outfits, sweets… sometimes the ideas just pop into our heads and we don’t know where they’ve come from!

You are very pink and purple! Talk us through your choice in colour pallet.

We really liked the super sweet intensely feminine and princessy vibe going on at the minute so we sort of ran with the girly colours. We do juxtapose with the dark P.V.C pieces though so there are pieces for people who like the darker look too.

Will you ever get sick of those colours?

I don’t think we will ever get sick of them but we will probably move on to different colours as tme progresses as we love to change things up and keep our customers guessing. You will probably see a spectrum of colours from us as seasons changes.

Will these colour schemes change as Spring/Summer fades or is it here to stay? And why?

They will stay for now but some pieces may progress to darker hues. We are still completely in love with our Pastel Dream coat but it has the potential to be made into different colour schemes which will be fun to experiment with come Winter.

What would you say to those who think your style is a little tacky or perhaps too sickly in colour and texture for their liking?

Each to their own. Fashion would be no fun if everyone liked the same thing!

Talk us through your scrunchie design!

Making scrunchies was one of the very first things we did when we started the brand, and we wanted to do ones that we hadn’t seen before. We made a few clear orange P.V.C giant scrunchies which were popular and carried on making some out of the spare fabric we had. They are perfect for particularly our younger customers who may not have the money to buy a larger piece but can buy a scrunchie or two instead.

Your work is very reminiscent of the ’90s and quite nostalgic in that sense. Is this deliberate, is so how come?

Yes, we are loving the ’90s at the minute! The name Saccharine Shrine actually comes from when I was young in the late ’90s and my mum said I wasn’t allowed loads of sweets because they had Saccharine in them. We just really liked a mix of ’90s textures and shapes and developed them with other more futuristic inspiration and unusual fabrics.

Will this alter as the ’90s goes out of trend again? Talk us through this.

Yes as we are not ’90s specific. We make what we want to wear at the time, and we go through almost obsessional phases, at the minute we are still in the feminine princess ’90s , but who knows what the next one will be? The great thing is we can add pieces whenever we like so we are quite flexible in that respect.

P.V.C can be seen as quite a sexy, naughty material. What are your thoughts on this? Is there any inkling of this in your own work?

Yes! We love to use P.V.C and we see it as quite a cheeky material and not an overtly sexual one. We use it on pieces where you would not expect P.V.C to be used, such as our P.V.C bomber jackets. We love the fact that P.V.C has become more wearable and not as super scandalous as it once was, P.V.C should be the new denim!

What other materials do you use in your work?

We use a lot of faux leatherette, marabou and wool, no one guesses but we actually sew each loop of the Dream coat ourselves out of one continuous ball of wool! We like the fact that our fabrics are unique and have to be of a certain quality before we use them for our collection.

What would become of you if the world ran out of P.V.C and fluff? How would you cope?

We’d cry then make some new crazy fabric out of whatever we could find!

What advice would you give to someone looking to create something similar to you?

Just do it! We took a chance coming straight out of college and starting this brand up, and it was the best thing we ever did.

What is the dream?

Carry on doing what we’re doing, and develop many more Dream collections to come!

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